When it comes to journalism, Hugh Aynesworth's career feels a bit like Zelig, the Woody Allen movie whose title character ends up in a slew of historical moments. Now 87, Aynesworth first made his mark covering the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for The Dallas Morning News.

Then a spry 32, Aynesworth witnessed the assassination in Dealey Plaza, saw suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald handcuffed in the Texas Theatre and stood close enough to feel the heat from Jack Ruby’s Colt Cobra as it fired a single, fatal shot into Oswald’s abdomen in the basement of the Dallas police station.

All of that happened in 48 hours and helped lay the foundation for Aynesworth probing the psyche of serial killer Ted Bundy. That’s right, Ted Bundy.

Here it is 2019, and less than three years away from 90, Aynesworth appears in and serves as co-executive producer of a new Netflix series — Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes — that, in the parlance of the day, has gone viral.

But it’s the Netflix seriesthat’s getting all the talk. As television goes, it is chilling, binge-worthy and eerily insightful.

As Library Journal writes of the 1989 Michaud-Aynesworth Conversations with a Killer, "Without ever admitting that he performed any of these acts [he maintained his innocence until hours before his execution], Bundy offers a matter-of-fact, third-person account of how 'someone' performing kidnappings, rapes, and murders might go about it and how that person might act under these circumstances. His frankness offers perhaps the most unfettered look into the mind of a serial killer.”

Air of innocence

It's not surprising that Aynesworth would be so gifted at getting people, even Bundy, to open up. He's a gentle, avuncular man with gray hair, soulful eyes and — this is often the case with great journalists — an air of complete innocence that complements an ability to listen, to be fully present. He's the kind of person that people, even Ted Bundy, feel comfortable sharing things with, no matter how dark or weird or endlessly painful they happen to be.

In 2020, Aynesworth, who lives in Preston Hollow with his wife Paula and two adoring cats, will celebrate his 70th year in journalism. And here he is, reaching yet another career milestone because of something called streaming, which he never could have imagined standing there in Dealey Plaza 55 years ago.

He marvels at how so many people of a younger generation — i.e., Millennials — are reaching out, wanting to know more about the mind of Bundy. The show has been so successful, the authors' literary agent has received bids on European rights for their second book. The movie, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile, whose title comes from the sentencing document against Bundy, recently debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. The film has no relationship to Michaud's and Aynesworth's books or the Netflix series, but it is another ingredient fueling interest into the authors' insights into Bundy.

The series has already paid a big dividend: It has spawned interest in a new book for Aynesworth, who hopes to write a biography of Texas serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, another sordid character he's written about in the past.

Hugh Aynesworth in 2015 in the Texas Theater, where President. John F. Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was captured in Dallas in 1963.

(Andy Jacobsohn/Staff Photographer)

Michaud and Aynesworth met Bundy in 1979 and in 1983 released their first biography, The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy. The pair spent at least a year — more than 100 hours in all — interviewing Bundy in a small, windowless, unguarded room in the Florida state prison. Aynesworth says that Bundy, whose hands were proven to be instruments of death, was never once handcuffed for interview sessions that often became frighteningly confrontational.

The authors first met at one of Aynesworth's numerous career stops, New York-based Newsweek magazine, where the older journalist became Michaud's editor and valued mentor.

"It's more than gratifying to see a book you published 36 years ago become a hit on Netflix," Michaud says, "via a technology that didn't even exist when the book first came out. It was, however, really strange to watch and listen to myself interacting with Ted 30 years after he was executed. It's a really unusual opportunity to relive an episode in your life."

Michaud also praises the documentary's director, Joe Berlinger, saying, "Those tapes in the wrong hands could really be dynamite. But Joe showed a lot of restraint with it." Michaud notes that Berlinger is doing double duty when it comes to Bundy. In addition to the series, he directed the feature film starring Efron.

In an eerie coincidence, Michaud and Bundy (who is less than two years older than the author) were both born in Burlington, Vt., and later moved with their mothers to Tacoma, Wash.

What's different, of course, is that Bundy was born in a home for unwed mothers, a fact he didn't discover until his teenage years, when he first laid eyes on a shocking truth in the family's attic — his birth certificate, which omitted the identity of the father.

The simplest psychosexual explanation for Bundy's more than 30 brutal slayings swirls like a tornado around the the rage he felt toward his mom for the role she played in giving birth to a bastard child — and keeping the truth from him. His surname comes from his adopted father, Johnny Bundy, one of hundreds of people Aynesworth interviewed, along with the mother.

Nice people, he says, but it was obvious the elder Bundy knew how guilty his stepson was, whereas the mother, even after hearing her son recount grotesque, homicidal details on the Michaud-Aynesworth tapes, responded with a chirpy, "Would anyone like some pie?"

The internet is buzzing about Netflix's controversial hit documentary, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, which is based on books by former 'Dallas Morning News' journalist Hugh Aynesworth and Stephen Michaud.

(Tom Fox/Staff Photographer)

Landmark interviews

Setting up their landmark taped interviews with Bundy required more than a little diligence. It helped, Aynesworth says, that, incredibly, Michaud and Bundy discovered that, when they first met, they had acquaintances in common from their days in Tacoma.

But initially,"Nobody," Aynesworth says, "could get in to interview Bundy."

So, the pair devised a strategy, the first of several to lay the groundwork that led, almost 40 years later, to the streaming series.

"I was a licensed private detective in Texas," Aynesworth says. "I'd do a job here and there. I knew I could get in by aligning myself with the defense attorneys, which I did. And then I got Stephen licensed too."

Naturally, it helped that Michaud and Bundy shared strangely similar roots in Washington state. But it took the intrepid pair deciding on a good-cop, bad-cop interviewing technique to make the difference. Aynesworth adopted the latter role.

"It worked very well," Aynesworth says. "Michaud spent maybe 30, 40 hours with Bundy, but it eventually made him sick. He didn't want to do it any more. So, then it was my turn."

Bundy was so resistant to confessing anything that the project threatened to die, with not nearly enough to show for it. Out of desperation, the authors decided on a strategy that, in the end, was a stroke of genius. They asked Bundy to discuss the crimes, in third person, as though someone else had committed them.

Happily, he agreed, as though being asked to be a commentator on Court TV. He responded with horrific insight and detail that serves as the ghastly underpinning of the Netflix series. The tape recorders of 1980 were primitive fossils compared to the digital marvels of today, but once he was willing to discuss his dozens of crimes in dreaded detail — in the third person — he would grab the recorder with his killer's hands, put it close to his mouth and chatter away, as if transfixed in a homicidal soliloquy.

Stephen Michaud (left) and Hugh Aynesworth in a photo from Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes

(Netflix)

Writing in the foreword to the second Michaud-Aynesworth book, Conversations with a Killer, Robert D. Keppel, chief investigator for the Washington State Attorney General's Office, hurls lavish praise at the authors, calling the book "such a valuable resource."

Keppel calls Bundy "resourceful, intelligent and relentless; he was always hunting, always perfecting his approach to his victims. He chose ways to dispose of their bodies with infinite care, and he assiduously studied how police investigations are conducted in order to further reduce his chances of being caught. Bundy, above all, did not want to be caught, ever."

Bundy's reign of terror began during the final year of the presidency of Richard Nixon, who happened to be one of his heroes, a politician whose 1972 re-election campaign Bundy had happily assisted as a Republican Party volunteer. Keppel writes in the forewordthat, in Seattle and surrounding King County, "we didn't know we had a serial killer until Ted had killed at least eight young women in the region, probably more."

Bundy is believed to have killed before this date, but the investigation did not commence until 1974, when a white male subject, seen driving a Volkswagen and "calling himself 'Ted,' had apparently lured two women, separately and at different times, from a popular local lake park in broad daylight," Keppel writes.

More than two months later, "parts of their skeletons were discovered on a hillside east of Seattle," Keppel writes. The severely fractured skulls of four other Bundy victims (all of these were killed prior to the summer of 1974) were found in a similar wooded location.

Before Ted Bundy was executed in the electric chair in Florida in 1989, at age 42, he had reluctantly confessed to 30 homicides in seven states between 1974 and 1978.

(Netflix/

)

30 homicides

Bundy turned to crime, including shoplifting, Aynesworth says, as a mixed-up kid in his 20s. (One of the people interviewed in the series points to Bundy as showing symptoms of schizophrenia.) Bundy is now known as a serial killer, a kidnapper, a rapist, a burglar and a necrophiliac. Before he was executed in the electric chair in Florida in 1989, at age 42, he had reluctantly confessed to 30 homicides in seven states between 1974 and 1978.

His victims were white, young and female, which does not make the Netflix documentary immune from criticism in the #MeToo era. ProPublica senior reporter and former Texas Monthly journalist Pamela Colloff, who has written her own share of true crime stories, took aim at the series on Twitter.

“Everything that can go wrong in telling a crime story is on display in the Ted Bundy Tapes,” she tweeted. “It feels exploitative, superficial, lurid & disrespectful to the victims. Giving Bundy a voice — especially when he had nothing of substance to say — is grotesque. What a disappointment.”

Adding to that icky feeling perhaps, younger viewers raised on Instagram selfies seem to be fixating on Bundy’s good looks. Netflix felt compelled to respond to the phenomenon by issuing an official tweet:

“I've seen a lot of talk about Ted Bundy’s alleged hotness and would like to gently remind everyone that there are literally THOUSANDS of hot men on the service — almost all of whom are not convicted serial murderers.”

A photo of some of women Ted Bundy killed is included in Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. Bundy's victims "were all very young. I guess the oldest might have been 28. Most were between 18 and 22," Hugh Aynesworth says.

(Netflix)

We reached out to Colloff via email, and this was her response:

"Hugh Aynesworth is one of the giants of Texas journalism, and someone I have tremendous admiration for both personally and professionally. His investigative work that exposed Henry Lee Lucas as a fraud and that bore witness to the Branch Davidian siege has been an inspiration to me and many reporters I know. His work on the Ted Bundy case was published in the 1980s against the larger backdrop of what appeared to be a wave of sexual violence against women.

"Unfortunately, the Netflix series feels like a throwback to a time when popular culture glamorized serial killers and recounted their crimes in all their titillating detail with little regard for the victims.

"Ted Bundy was executed 30 years ago. What does telling his story now illuminate? Imagine, instead, that the filmmakers had told this story from the perspective of his surviving victims and his slain victims' loved ones. Or imagine that the filmmakers had told a completely different story entirely that was more relevant to the concerns we have about our criminal justice system today."

The series draws heavily from the second Michaud-Aynesworth book, Conversations with a Killer, which law enforcement officials praised at the time for helping them cope with a relatively new phenomenon — the serial killer, which did not reach epidemic status until 1969, when the Manson family slayings terrorized America.

No one was more repulsed by Bundy than Aynesworth.

Because he's the father of two women in their 50s who were then teenagers, Aynesworth found Bundy increasingly hard to stomach. He also grew weary of Bundy being utterly unwilling to cop to a single crime, until the pair resorted to the clever backdoor strategy. Having Bundy speak in the third person worked like magic, as the series elucidates so dramatically. The authors asked Bundy to "imagine" the crimes and how the killer might have committed them. Bundy reveled in the role, but before then, it felt like a waste of time.

"We jockeyed back and forth for weeks. I spent at least 60 hours with him, in a little old cell. We hated each other," Aynesworth says. It was almost as though Bundy had a split personality, one in first person, the other in third person. The former, in Aynesworth's words, was nervous and arrogant and completely uncooperative.

Serial killers rising

As the documentary shows so insightfully, Bundy's crimes began at a time when America was coping with the rise of the serial killer. True-crime aficionados have long been fascinated with Bundy's charisma and his ruggedly handsome looks. He used both to approach women in public places, feigning injury or disability before assaulting them in secluded locations. He also tried the tactic of pretending to be a police officer, albeit one without a uniform or badge.

The victims, Aynesworth says, "were all very young. I guess the oldest might have been 28. Most were between 18 and 22. He watched some of them for days, maybe weeks. He was handsome, and in those days, people hitchhiked more than usual."

A photo from Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes shows a FBI "Wanted" poster for Bundy.

(Netflix)

He was also incredibly elusive. In Colorado, where he killed at least three people, he escaped twice, once jumping out of a second-story window in an Aspen courthouse.

Even before adopting the third-person strategy, Aynesworth said Bundy was proud of what he'd done, without ever admitting it.

Once, when he asked him a question, Bundy slapped the reporter's knee and said, "You know better than that. How many years have you been a journalist?"

"More than you've been a killer," Aynesworth said.

On March 30, 1981, the day President Ronald Reagan was shot, Aynesworth was alone with Bundy in the interview room. Aynesworth was shocked to learn the identity of Reagan's would-be assassin, John Hinckley Jr., who went to the same Dallas high school as Aynesworth's daughters. Aynesworth's revelation ignited a fire of envy in Bundy.

"He'll be famous," Bundy said with a snarl, his jealousy flaring. And then he told Aynesworth, "When I get out of here, maybe I'll go get somebody famous — like the president's daughter."

Learning the truth

Bundy's discovery about the identity of his biological father, or the lack thereof, and his mother hiding the truth from him, has long intrigued Michaud and Aynesworth. So, of course, they asked him about it.

And he admitted it was a psychological gut punch. He spoke of taking his beloved dog to a nearby hill and hiding out for days.

"I didn't know how to react," he said to Aynesworth, sadly, boyishly.

It ruined his education. "He dropped out of everything," Aynesworth says. "At the same time, he was dating a girl who broke up with him," provoking a second psychological tsunami.

A young Ted Bundy, in a photo from Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.

(Netflix)

"The truth is," Aynesworth says, "he never once had a good relationship with a woman."

He caught a break when he got into law school, but alas, that failed too.

"It was then," Aynesworth says, "that he started killing."

There's a downside to writing about the likes of Ted Bundy. In recent years, women have contacted Aynesworth, claiming to be someone Bundy tried to kill.

A 1979 jail photo of convicted serial killer Theodore "Ted" Bundy.

(AP)

"All were fakes," says the journalist, who has experience with fakery. He believes, without a doubt, that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy, which has made Aynesworth an object of ridicule and contempt among conspiracy theorists, many of whom also rely, in his view, on egregiously false information.

Are there parallels between the Kennedy assassination and the Bundy case?

"Oh, my, yes," Aynesworth says. "It started out the same, with people thinking the accused was not guilty. In the Kennedy thing, it's taken wings of its own, of course."

And then he pauses. "The strain on me has, at times, been difficult."

As Aynesworth points out, "there are now more than 200 different conspiracy theories."

Nearing 90, Aynesworth has shaken hands with presidents, world leaders and the giants of journalism, including his friend and hero, Walter Cronkite. But no handshake is more memorable than that of Theodore Robert Cowell, otherwise known as Ted Bundy.

From the moment he met him, "I couldn't stop looking at his hands," Aynesworth says. "Those hands snuffed out the lives of a lot of people. One time he caught me — and then he laughed."

Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes is currently streaming on Netflix.